Featured image: The Maywood Plaza, where the Maywood Police Department is considering establishing a sub-post. | File

The Maywood Police Department could soon have a permanent presence beyond its current headquarters at 125 S. 5th Ave.

During a regular meeting on June 4, Maywood Police Chief Valdimir Talley told members of the Maywood Board of Trustees that he was in favor of accepting an offer from an area bank to setup a sub-post next to a soon-to-open branch at Maywood Plaza, 1109-23 W. Madison St.

In the spring, Wintrust Financial Corporation secured 1,800-square-feet of space in the plaza in order to open a full-service branch of Proviso Community Bank, which is part of Wintrust’s family of community banks.

According to a previous report, Bridgette Chatman-Lewis, the principal at Chatman Lewis Flaggs Enterprises, said that the Maywood Plaza’s redevelopment is part of a comprehensive redevelopment initiative her firm is spearheading in the area called The Square project. Earlier this year, she said more businesses will be moving into the plaza in the near future.

“In [Wintrust’s] architectural rendering, they’re offering for us to have office space at $1 a year. They are tenants in the plaza and we’d be sub-tenants of them,” Talley said during the June 4 meeting, adding that the bank has a 10-year lease within the shopping plaza.

Wintrust officials, who are expecting the bank to open sometime this summer, confirmed that they made the offer.

Bank in 2015, the Maywood Board of Trustees allocated about $53,000 in the proposed FY 2015-16 budget to pay for phase one costs associated with installing a police sub-post somewhere in the vicinity of Fifth Avenue and Roosevelt Road. Another $5,000 was allocated for a site study. All of the costs were to be covered through Roosevelt Road TIF [Tax Increment Fund] money.

Some trustees on the board at the time recommended sub-post locations at 17th and Prairie Path, specifically one within a building at 1213 S. 17th Avenue. Since those discussions four years ago, however, a police sub-post has not materialized.

During the June 4 meeting, Talley said that a police sub-post within the Maywood Plaza “would allow us to respond more readily to our Madison and 17th Avenue areas, which are problematic areas. This will give us a quicker response time.”

Talley said that the department has in the past had an officer stationed inside of Irving Middle School in Maywood, but that the Maywood Plaza location “would be a better option for us.”

Talley said that the sub-post would be a room roughly the size of a walk-in closet — with a desk and chairs — next to the bank branch. He added that a police presence in the plaza, which is across the street from a childcare center and within several blocks of Irving, would benefit an area that has had two homicides within the last three years.

During the meeting, Trustee Isiah Brandon asked whether or not other locations in the village, such as those that officials were targeting four years ago, would be better suited for sub-posts.

“I don’t want to be providing security just because a particular business is moving in,” Brandon said. “We want to make sure that its a help to the residents.”

Talley said that those options from 2015 all involved capital expenses; whereas the prospective plaza sub-post is virtually free and involves an officer carrying his laptop into a space that would be more easily accessible than the police department for area residents.

The board voted unanimously to allow Talley to further explore the idea of establishing a sub-post at the Maywood Plaza. Trustees are scheduled to make a final vote on the matter in the coming weeks. VFP